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It seems like every week a new accelerator program is opening, yet if you ask around just as many seem to be closing their doors. Considering all of this and contemplating our career moves after muru-D, Amra Naidoo (who ran Operations and Marketing for muru-D) and I realized that there is a “third way” to operate a startup accelerator, and together we decided that we’re going to run with it…

It is common for a startup to atrophy based on slow or improper decision making. To understand why they atrophy you need only look at why incumbent businesses fail to disrupt. Slower more conservative decisions. Incumbents often have smart and proficient minds like startups, yet they're constrained to the self-inflicted pace of progress in the cube farm…

As we go through the regional Roadshow for Accelerating Asia, promoting the program, I thought it would be useful to provide a few tips on pitching.

At each of our Roadshow events we have a pitch competition, with the winner gaining automatic entry to the second round of the application process. Since our program typically receives well over 200 applications this can mean the startup gets a pass to leap past at least 150 other applications!

The pitch format is really basic: A 1-minute pitch with no slides. Here’s some tips on how to ace your pitch.

Accelerating Asia is unique in the region. As the only independent accelerator program we have the freedom to design a program tailored to maximizing the chances that our startups will succeed. How? This is how we do it.

As we gear up for cohort 1 of Accelerating Asia, I am getting asked “What profile of startups are you looking for?”. It’s a good question since we don’t have a vertical focus and our investment terms are very flexible in term of valuation (we use a SAFE). At a top level we are open to any awesome founders solving big problems, but here are the 7 main things that we look for.